Oct 16 2008
And the Booker Award goes to Aravind Adiga!
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If sportsmen had made India proud by winning gold medals in Olympics this time, Indian writers are not far behind in bringing laurels to our nation. The latest star of Indian soil is Aravind Adiga. This 33-year-old Chennai-born Mumbaikar has won the Man Booker Prize for his debut novel, The White Tiger. Adiga is the fifth Booker winner of Indian ethnicity and the second youngest winner in the award’s 40-year history. He is also the third winner for a debut novel, the first debut novelist to win the Booker Prize being Arundhati Roy.
Booker Award
In an interview about his novel Adiga gave some insight about the book by saying, “The book is funny and provocative, and I guess that is what has clicked. Humour makes a stronger point. I tried to tell a very real story about India on the brink of unrest. I tried to challenge the assumptions that many in middle-class India hold about the poor: that they are stupid, easily manipulated, excessively religious and bound by caste and family.”
“India is dealing with great duality today. There are men with big bellies and men with small bellies’. It’s a metaphor to capture the duality (feast or famine) of human existence in India today. The world needed to see the other side of India.”
Adiga is a journalist-turned-writer and had worked with Time magazine. While working for this magazine he got the opportunity to travel throughout India, especially UP and Bihar. This brought him in closer contact with the rural life in India and gave him a glimpse of the problems poor people are facing in most of rural India. In his book he has tried to capture the sentiments of the colossal underclass and has also attacked the rotten political system that is stopping half of this country from achieving its potential.
I’m personally enthralled at Aravind Adiga’s achievement and wish him all the best for his future endeavors.
